Imprints

We watched while the logs were licked and caressed and eventually consumed by the sinuous dance of the fire. Daring flames occasionally leapt out, and my skin reddened under the heat. Notes lifted with the smoke to drift over the small crowd, as the guitar player’s fingers lazily plucked the strings. We had come to the end of our time together; exploring the formation of this small island, clambering over rocks that had been bent, ripped, and pulled back into the depths only to erupt anew, all in a past beyond our sight.

Now, gathered on the waves of night-cold sand, the ground felt lifeless and inert compared to the hot vitality of the campfire. Through the smoke, I saw the olivine sea shining in moonlight, and I wished for this time not to pass, for the fire to more slowly turn to cinders. But it would soon be snuffed out by kicks of sand and beer-dregs, left to cool and whisper strands of smoke in the dark, while the sand beneath continues its grinding flow for aeons to come, on a timescale beyond the snatches of light from a fire or a human life. I shuffled in the sand, and the feel of the smooth stone keepsake in my pocket reminded me that precious moments may be kept, for the world is not immune to small memories. After a week in this sun-dried landscape, outcropping from an ever-present horizon of blue, I had found treasure.

Our group were earlier scattered over the rocks like sand-fleas; the flecks of small black notebooks each member carried dotted the shore while the chinks of rock-hammers rung out. We were all one and the same, if but for a small detail hidden in my pocket. For my small black book was not quite like the others. Its aged, crinkled and weatherworn pages held a small detail known for now only to me.

It was not my first field notebook, the one full of rudimentary sketches and amateur measures of bedding plane angles and grain size measures. This one had been given to me by as we had passed the nearby village. I had heard the familiar “Kaliméra” that often accompanied a welcome proffering of bread rolls or oranges from the cheerily lackadaisical locals, but this voice came more urgently. The salutation erupted from thin-set lips that appeared more accustomed to silent ruminations than exclamations; baring bright teeth that may be dazzling between happier lips. Deep furrows of the man’s brow joined light crow’s feet that softly radiated from his grey eyes like a pinched handkerchief. The man’s dove-grey eyes met mine, and soon darted back towards the shoreside rocks that would be our next site. His next words came clearly in native English, not the Greek expected in these quiet hills, and soon his sober tone revealed a fascinating request, and reward. Bring him evidence from those sea-salted outcrops of the creature in the small black book he held out, and $20,000 would be mine, no strings attached. He had pushed the beaten notebook into my arms and urged me on before I had chance to protest or even to question, and still reeling from the last detail he had shared.

And so I rambled over the steep crags far from the growing crowd on the beach, across fissile planes of sandstone crumbling into unassuming tufts. I paused. After field lectures and the days spent imbuing our eyes with the history beneath the land, I knew the potential history within these stone pages. With half my mind drifting to thoughts of dipping into the cool waters nearby and forgetting this surely futile quest, I climbed yet higher, across perilous buffs and scarps. After many checks I was sure I had reached the place pinpointed in the man’s notebook. I leafed through some splinters and larger shards of the rock and held an unassuming surface to face the bright Aegean sun. Through the bowed glass of my hand lens the delicate imprints of a single bird’s tracks became visible. It couldn’t be.

One hundred million years ago, this nameless bird would have wandered quietly past waves that lapped moisture onto a distant shoreline; not ours, but a forgotten shore that spread over this land before time had a name. In the aeons, epochs and ages since, countless numbers were born, fought for a fragile grip on the Earth, and returned to the ground, while the deep rhythms of the land remained, slowly fossilising a moment’s footfalls. This precious moment, captured for an eternity, was now seen again; resurrected.

I looked again over the small sketches of the delicate outlines of the ichnite trace fossil in my little black book, brushed the imprints from sediment, and carefully bagged the etched slab that had resisted the pull of time. I reread the first pages again, filled briefly with the personal details of a girl my age from a time past, eager to learn and exhilarated with her improbable discovery. The revered late daughter of a man now too weak to reach these rocks and bring to life her brightest moment; of ecstatic discovery amongst the bright of the sea and sun.

For the man’s parting words to me described the last time he looked upon such pale eyes as mine, their tenacity tempered by surrounding frailty. He had seen his daughter Caro’s feeble form; her papery skin stretched over bones too-apparent, revealing the wasteland of a body ravaged by illness. Even now he remembered lightness of her thinned wrist in his hand, which in his grasp lay cool and unmoving, like ornamental porcelain. As she faded, his wrenching grief was held back as he saw her finally released from her pain. The days and nights of grief that followed blurred into bleakness and he had drifted from his grieving family into isolation, selling his house and moving to the island of her last happiness, the joy he read in her pages and sketches of traced bird footprints in the Jurassic limestones of Ionia. We all live in such small moments, these glimpses of life. Like dust drifting through a shaft of light, we may blaze and shine for an instant on this Earth, but as the seas roll and the mountains fold our light may be quenched before an image is formed, as in our short sight we toil and fight to survive.

And so was my quest. Bring him evidence of her story. Discover if Caro was right in her notes; that this possible trace of Alcmonavis poeschli is the only Jurassic creature ever found beyond the famous Archaeopteryx to be capable of flight. As just the second ever evidence discovered of the mysterious aviator, the Jurassic aeronaut, the archives would grow a new page, with Caro’s name immortalised as discoverer. To a man of accumulated means, modest living and urgent dreams, he insisted the $20,000 was fair and could be mine, to pay off the student debts and never stop exploring the rocky paths of history, to continue to bring the past alive.

Centuries may pass; civilisations, cultures, religions rise and fall. They are seen only as a breeze to carry the drifting flecks of dust; soon to change direction or fade to calm, when the flecks are left to settle back to the accepting ground, pressed back into the layers of the Earth. But from these layers I carried the carefully wrapped imprints aeons in the making, careful to protect what was chosen to be reborn from a world long gone.

Though we were but students, novices to these deep archives of Earth, everything had now changed for me; I was admitted to a future yet more unfathomable and unfixed than the past. Half-joking and half-hoping, we would swap stories of finding gold nuggets or precious stones and what adventures would lie ahead with the bountiful riches from such treasures. No one thought so much about the light touch of a Jurassic trace fossil, despite these Coelurosaurian ancestors of the birds being our strongest, most tangible connection to the unknowable worlds of the dinosaurs. A world when days were shorter, the moon larger in the sky, and nothing had a name. But this creature’s brief steps upon the Earth had a name, and they were now beyond treasure in money and meaning.

A slight shift in the cool night breeze made my eyes smart from the wood smoke, as it screened out the world around us. As the motionless sea and the beach around us grew hazy, the star-speckled ink depths high above grew closer. With this eternity above, and the already fading flames ahead, I shuffled over to take a place amongst my friends. I enjoyed this last night of simplicity before the world would change forever in the morning, with my delivery to the man on the hill. As we sat protected by the warmth of the camp, the comfort of our smaller time was tangible in the thicker air, the warmed sand, and the gently foaming waves. As the greying ashes slowly drew colour from the now smouldering logs, the vibrant flames slowed and turned blue with the cold.

The dark coals of our fire may themselves be preserved in layers beneath our feet, set within sand and hardened, to take our moments to an even deeper time, when mountains beyond this island were raised, oceans filled and valleys carved. Life arose and diversified into unexpected richness as it strove to reach the light and continue creation, on an Earth that had birthed, sustained, and saw the end of it all. There are diaphanous imprints you leave, footprints that fade as quickly as the next tide and yet are also fixed, immovable, anchored. Perhaps they are already now of another place, another time, of another life. As the world quietly continues to fuse sands into stone, oblivious to the short struggles on its thin, brittle skin, I smiled as within my own time, my own moment; making my own imprints in the sand.

- by Georgia Melodie Hole